It’s the definition of ‘too big to fail’, and it’s been a viable and effective strategy… for ever? Near as I can tell. He’ll, the Fed even got created because of the time the whole US economy cratered in the early 20th century and one man was the one whole bailed out the whole country.

'Too big to fail' is only said about companies that didn't collapse yet though.

Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom comes to mind. Even Blockbuster could be on that list...

The take away is they weren’t big enough to have enough leverage eh?

> The take away is they weren’t big enough to have enough leverage eh?

This reasoning has some parallels to "everything that can't be explained by science must be god". It stays valid even when proven wrong...

Eh, if they died and everything didn’t actually break in a terrible unsolvable way, then….

It’s essentially a form of market extortion though, so perception of ‘survivable’ matters as much as actually survivable eh?

I instinctively want to agree with you here and bemoan the state and directions of the world. But if I really think about it, it's been happening my entire life. I'm mid 30's now. I assume someone older than me would have had the same experience of it happening their entire life.

You're right though, it's crappy and merits a lot of geopolitical reflection. But I suspect it goes back millenia and is a manifestation of basic evolutionary biology with the business world, rather than anything that can be solved/fixed.

And we've gone full circle about the balance of working for/against humanity in the name of progress.

I'm a bit older now, and while there has always been corporate meddling in public decision-making (which is unavoidable and also somewhat needed to help steer the boat a bit in some situations), the economic effort a company has to invest rectify wrongdoing mainly shaped the amount of spending for legal counseling and lobbying, but it didn't directly shape a ruling.

Today, environmental/privacy/safety laws are suddenly not that strict anymore, because now we naturally need to also take economic interests of the violating company into account.

So you might end up in a situation where an official body will officially rule that the harmed party may be right, but needs to be pragmatic about its needs just because of the increased inconvenience it would create for the opposing party if THEY would have to change their way.

In my experience, this was not the case 15 years ago.

The EPA is only two decades older than you, and it enforced a bunch of brand new regulation on all the existing companies. There used to be a willingness to actually govern rather than cede everything to corporate interest.

Given that the offending entity is owned by the world's richest man certainly their 'pleading how uneconomic it would be for you to change course' should be dismissed instantly without a second thought.